


By the numbers I

by i_gaze_at_scully



Series: Movie night [11]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-09-06 21:02:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16840369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_gaze_at_scully/pseuds/i_gaze_at_scully
Summary: Timeline is roughly The Rain King up to right before Milagro.





	By the numbers I

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline is roughly The Rain King up to right before Milagro.

x.

Ten years he’d known Diana when she left for Europe. A decade. One third of his life. In ten years, their minds met, their bodies sparked, their love bloomed. He offered her a splintered heart and she sutured his wounds. He unearthed a world full of shadows with her and they shone light into the dark together. When she left, he buried her and honed in on his quest, the only guiding light he had left. But some truths, he decided as he tried to purge ten years from his mind, are better left interred. 

ix.

9:40 AM and the fog settles in thick over Kroner, Kansas. 9:00 PM and they’re in a high school auditorium playing matchmaker like they’re teens again. Scully slips into the bathroom with a distraught bottle blonde in her 40s, pulling on all the times she doled out advice to boy crazed friends in her teens.

 _Not even a kiss?_ Scully knows there’s no use trying to explain what she has with Mulder to this woman. She can’t even explain it to herself. 

_Well, it seems to me that the best relationships, the ones that last, are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship._ Six years of friendship, of immeasurable trust, of living and dying for one another. 

_You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere._ Switch off the lights, switch up the rules, switch from _what if_ to _what now_. 

_And the person who was just a friend is suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with._ It’s Scully and Mulder, Mulder and Scully, forever. She knows that much. She wonders what Mulder knows. 

viii.

Eight months since the night Scully crawled into his lap and out of his bed before dawn. The night they never talked about. He’d traced the veins in her inner arm as they lay together afterwards, followed the electricity under her skin like a live wire. He memorized the feel of her weight on his chest, the smell of her hair and the lust in her eyes. He could close his eyes at any point and be with her again, and he did. Often. 8:00 the Monday morning after and he could tell the second she walked in the door that her walls were up again. He didn’t have words for her anyway; nothing could capture the intensity of his feelings quite right. _I love you,_ he could’ve said, but he wouldn’t for months. _I’d do anything for you_ , but he’d prove that over the summer. He didn’t say anything, didn’t penetrate the thin membrane between them, the only thing standing between friends and lovers, partners and _partners._ He thinks about that night often, and what he wishes he’d said. _Next time, let me make you breakfast._

vii.

Seven times he calls while she’s in New York on the Fellig case. His separation anxiety radiates through the phone. She plays the skeptic into the mouthpiece, but without Mulder there, someone has to believe. And part of her does believe the man who never dies in the city that never sleeps. When Mulder comes to the hospital, the way he takes her hand tells her everything.

vi.

Six baskets he’d sunk when she walked into the gym in her suit, like they still had anything to dress for. Six swishes of the net, and about as many misses. Near misses, but misses nonetheless. She’s come with a box full of what he can only imagine are hollow truths and blatant lies, a sham of a man masquerading in clouds of cigarette smoke.

But then Scully does what she does best. She pulls him out of his bitter apathy and lights a fire under him again. 

_The project is still going on._

_Yeah._

Administrative leave be damned, he’s going to put an end to this. Right here, right now.

v.

Five words. _Scully, you’re making this personal._

He may as well have struck her. It would have stung far less. His words are a poison and she spits it back at him, the taste of it singing her tongue. _There is no reason for me to continue._ She hopes he knew what she meant, and that she was deathly serious. Without his trust, there was nothing. Nothing between them, nothing for her here. She storms out of the room before she does something she’d regret. 

iv.

Four minutes Mulder spends rifling through the box of unorganized photos under Diana’s bed. She kept that box under their bed when they lived together, a collection of memories too dear to throw away, too painful to display. A picture of her atop her father’s shoulders as a child, back when she was too small to know that a father isn’t supposed to touch his daughter the way hers did. A picture of her mother the marathon runner in a wheelchair days before she passed, a picture of a long dead childhood pet. And now, pictures of her and Mulder. One at the Outer Banks on their anniversary, one where they’re wrapped up in each other at a bonfire, one of them dancing at a friend’s wedding. He came looking for evidence of trespasses against him and found fossils instead. 

When she comes home, Mulder closes his eyes and lets the ghost of a woman he used to love kiss him into the apocalypse.

iii.

Three things happen the day they get the X Files back.

Jeffrey Spender leaves to clear out his desk and is found shot an hour later in an office that reeks of smoke. His blood seeps into the rug with all the rest of the blood on their hands. 

_They burned themselves,_ Mulder obfuscates Kersh. _With a choice made long ago by a conspiracy of men who thought they could sleep with the enemy._ She can’t tell by the look he gives her as he says it if it’s a confession or an apology. 

Scully removes Diana Fowley’s name plate herself, scraping off the glue with vigor. She prays the bitch will walk away with her tail tucked between her legs, out of their lives for good. 

ii.

Two days they spend as husband and wife. Rob and Laura Petrie. 

“Real subtle there with the last name, Doctor Scully,” Mulder teases. “My wife, the mad scientist.” He makes himself at home on her couch while she packs her things for the trip. 

“I’m not your wife, Mulder.” She comes over and swats his legs off her coffee table. She rolls her eyes when he feigns injury. 

“Could’ve fooled me.”

He twists the ring on his finger in California after Scully kicks him out of the bedroom. Two years before Scully showed up, he’d taken a stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue, poking his head into jewelry shops to find the perfect ring for Diana. Luckily he never found one, because two months later she was gone. He never told Scully that, but judging by the cold shoulder she’s given him, she intuited it. 

Diana had reappeared and reanimated a part of him he was sure was dead and buried. There was no music anymore, but they fell into a rhythm. He couldn’t compare her to Scully. He wouldn’t. They occupied completely separate spaces inside him, interacted with different versions of himself. But Scully wouldn’t trust Diana, wouldn’t trust _him_. And Diana seemed to live suspended in time, like she had a place in life still. Mulder couldn’t make heads or tails of it. 

Two women, one coin. 

i.

One night,

it all

comes tumbling

down. 

**Author's Note:**

> I need to give a huge thank you shout out to @peacenik0, @how-i-met-your-mulder, and @arquivo-xis on tumblr. I was extremely blocked on this one. The idea has been in my head since chapter three of this series, and I’ve been both dreading and looking forward to it ever since. Each of these wonderful people helped make this possible through thoughtful feedback, probing questions, and much moral support. Thank you.


End file.
